


The Last Summer

by considerghostingwontyou



Series: Things To Be Considered [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Also I'm starting this out with no plans for how the magic is going to settle, And this is taking me so much longer than I had hoped it would, But that's because my research is making it really hard to just make up some fake magic, F/M, M/M, These relationships are complicated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-07-14 06:04:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16034504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/considerghostingwontyou/pseuds/considerghostingwontyou
Summary: Sebastian Moran is fading.Only a short time ago he was the golden boy of his family- driven, intelligent, handsome- a star athlete with a longtime girlfriend and a bright future that people were fighting to be part of. For some unknown reason though, after completing his schooling he fizzled out. Set to wandering around the continent on his parent's funding without destination, without plans, and without any idea of what had set him on that path.On invitation from his family Sebastian returns home for the summer, only to find that while they're happy to have him, no one really seems to have the time to spend that he'd hoped they would, instead consumed by their own projects, thus leaving him to himself, or perhaps to the ghosts of the house.





	1. And Then Sevrin Called

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Summer House](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2581136) by [considerghostingwontyou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/considerghostingwontyou/pseuds/considerghostingwontyou). 



> These drafts are taking a lot longer than I thought they would, they might have to be weekly.
> 
> This is a reboot of the fic "The Summer House" from this series. Chapters will sometimes end with an audience poll in order to choose-your-own-adventure this version of the story. This will be a test of that system. Readers will have THREE DAYS from the posting of a chapter until the poll closes. Poll links will be posted.
> 
> Also I've been drinking a LOT of coffee and reading a LOT of Outlander so I'm sorry for caffeinated and kilt-induced weirdness. 
> 
> I also expect next chapter to be longer.

When Sevrin called, Sebastian was a month into the trek down the Camino de Santiago. It was the latest in a long line of trips since Sebastian's graduation- he'd been leaving Lambert and Butler's around the world for almost two years now as the golden boy glow faded from his hair and his life. When he'd left home, it was for a month of exploration before he settled down and went to Uni, but one month in Tibet had turned into a second month on the Great Wall, and then a third on a sacred Indian river, and a few herding in Mongolia, protesting in Palestine, digging wells in Haiti, and farming in South America. In a youth hostel he'd traded a wrinkled copy of _Sidarthua_ for a waterlogged paperback by Coelho and that had brought him to Spain, walking the four hundred miles that circles the country on a pilgrimage route for a religion that he didn't believe in. Spiritual enlightenment wasn't something that seemed especially important to Sebastian Moran, but he'd heard that some people walked to find themselves- he hoped that walking would ease the restlessness inside him, but instead it'd only worn though another pair of jeans and given him enough time to grow a short boxed beard.

"Spain?"

"Mmm."

It was good to hear from Sev. His brother was one of only a few people in the world who hadn't started to look at him differently when he hadn't returned to school. Maybe it was because there was something about the brother relationship that made it easier for them to see each other on a deeper level, or maybe it was because Severin was becoming everything that Sebastian had been before him and understood what it meant. 

"I take it that it hasn't been the breakthrough you were hoping for."

Sebastian chuckled, lighting up where he sat on the side of the road, taking in the beauty of a countryside that had been his only companion for so long now. 

"I don't know Sev... how am I supposed to go about finding something when I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for?"

"Ask a philosopher. Or your girlfriend. Don't know."

"Lot of help you are."

The young man blew smoke into the air, digging though his pack for his notebook and the cheap ballpoint pens he'd been carrying since the beginning, flipping though page after page of sketches, letters and journal entries of things that had got him nowhere. He'd filled notebook upon notebook just like this, all of them sent back to Irene or Sevrin for safe keeping, all of them useless. But he kept filling them even now, with yet another grouse perched on a stone just out of reach.

"You should come home for the summer. Mum's got some plan about restoring a mansion in Ireland- you could invite Rene to come out with you, I'm sure she'd be happy to see you. House is supposed to be out in the middle of nowhere. Good for long walks. New things to sketch. Hurling seems sort of like something you used to play."

"Are you trying to tell me that there's an intramural hurling league out in the same middle of nowhere where I'm supposed to take long walks and sketch new things undisturbed?"

"Maybe."

"You're an idiot."

"I'll pack for you."


	2. Green and Grey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ((I'm going to apologize right now for spelling grey with both an "a" and an "e" because there is almost no way that is not going to happen. I'm also sorry I have no Beta.))
> 
> Mostly, we see the house.
> 
> And get something to vote on.
> 
> ((I promise these will get longer.))

Only Orla Moran could look at a crumbling anglo manor house and see a place for her family to spend the summer.

The house was at least ten minutes from town driving, but walking it could easily take all morning. It wasn't really that it was so far away- from the window in his room Sebastian could see the cluster of civilization  tucked away against the green hills- it was more the winding of the road that treated what must have been landmarks long gone like sacred objects, and the curve of the lake that pushed itself into the path of where any sensible road ought to have been built since. Not for the first time Sebastian reflected that whoever had built this house must have liked the solitude. After all, how much more isolated would it have seemed in the days before modern transportation? But a family of the english gentry might have had good reasons to put distance between themselves as the others living on the land they'd come to own. Very good reasons indeed.

Sevrin had given him a short history when he'd picked up his brother in Dublin the day before. Considering how many miles lay between the airport and the place that the house actually stood, there had been plenty of time for it. Even without his brother's take on the high points of what Seb was sure had been a several hours long passionate lecture by his mother as she gushed about history and architecture styles as they evolved and crossed the ocean, there was enough in he way about the place to tell Seb all he needed to know. 

The house was beautiful, but felt out of place in the lush green of the countryside. Most of the old buildings in this area were grey stone buildings, short and solid structures that could have been carved out of the land. This house though was large and imposing, three stories tall with a long, low ballroom addition and a patio that had long since fallen though the ceiling. It even had a tall, square tower stuck onto the side that screamed it didn't belong. Coming closer it Sebastian noticed it was also grey- but not he cool, stable grey of stone- it was dirty, the remnants of some long ago fire clinging to the pale sides of the structure.

"Only the tower is livable right now." Sevrin had said it with Sebastian's backpack slung over his shoulder, almost as if he could tell his brother was having trouble believing any of it was safe for human occupation from the way he'd looked at the building. "It had an apartment added to it for the caretaker around the second world war after the bombings, fires, and decay had made most of the house unlivable, or we wouldn't even have a kitchen. Not that any of us know what to do with one." Sevrin grinned "Unless you've been learning how to cook on your adventures?"

 

No, he hadn't. But he had been learning to appreciate the beauty of the places he was in, and there was plenty of it to be seen even just from the fourth floor window that Sebastian had taken for himself. There was the lake shining off into the horizon, and the trails of little green hills that wandered here and there along the road. There were small clusters of trees, and a few small outbuildings (sheds? The ruins of sheds?), and somewhere just almost out of sight a herd of cows grazing. There was the town they'd driven through, quiet and settled in it's way, as if it had stood there since the beginning of time and would stand there long after the house and all it's occupants had crumbled into the dust of a collapsing star, and then there was the house. Even in it's state it was beautiful, all dirt and holes in the eaves, covered in ivy and climbing moss and the wildflowers that were staking their claim in the remains of fallen bricks or shattered windows, it was a thing of beauty. The house had been abandoned over and over again and through the doors he'd pushed open even for a moment Sebastian had seen the remnants of the lives that had been left behind- uniforms from the first world war, bonds from the second, victorian furniture, pamphlets from the revolution and books from every era scattered on every available surface. Old photos and molding paintings lined the walls. Most of them Seb didn't mind, after all, they were everywhere in the house and had been in many of the places that he'd visited over the last few years. Something about family portraits was universal, no matter how creepy looking or badly painted they were people wanted to remember the people that they'd loved or the ones who had come before them. Maybe it made people feel like they'd be remembered themselves one day. Or maybe other people liked to talk to their ancestors the way that Sebastian talked to the wrinkled photo of Irene in his wallet. 

Something about the painting in Sebastian's own room made him uncomfortable though. He didn't know what it was, it was like a thousand other paintings. Just a landscape of the house under renovation, the scaffolding around the tower and piles of bricks bright and new as the walls climbed higher near ancient trees that now were nothing but rotted stumps. There was nothing about it that bothered him. Not really. Nothing that justified the feeling that he was being watched.

But then, Sebastian hadn't noticed the small, dark shadow in the window of the library.

A shadow he might have seen himself if he'd looked at his own window from outside the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So um my job got strange again and that's killing me a little bit but I am still here and still writing so HAVE FAITH. 
> 
> Also they come from Dublin because I only know of two airports in Ireland and I understand more people fly in though Dublin than Cork so... Dublin.
> 
> Do you want to see a picture of the inspiration for this house? Look up the Mayfield house in Ireland!
> 
> Also I finally figured out how the magic was supposed to work at the end of this fic and it's so much less dark than it used to be? I mean it's dark but it's got a happy ending so that's new. I'm really proud of that actually and I hope that it actually ends up being as good when it's written as I think it will be.
> 
> THIS WEEK'S POLL: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/JV9ZHKW
> 
> Remember you have about 48/72 hours to throw in responses.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun dun GHOST SIGHTING!
> 
> I'm actually going to try and give you two chapters (or a super long one) next time because I wanted this to get a little farther but I'm burned rn. More will happen next time.

The intermural hurling league did not materialize.

It was an unfortunate development because Severin had been right- it did seem to be Sebastian's sort of game. He might have come to like it more than he'd liked lacrosse or field hockey if he'd been able to find anyone to play it with. In one of the downstairs cupboards, he'd found some old equipment and was having quite a lot of fun just trying to get used to the weight of the stick in his hand and the way it was supposed to move. Summer in Ireland was supposed to be relatively dry, but even so, it had been raining for a week already and there was only so much time a man could spend in a small room trying to learn how to maneuver a ball without losing his mind. Maybe if there had been a league, they'd have a field for when it dried out, or a gymnasium somewhere they could play indoors. Maybe they'd be willing to spend some time with someone with a little extra beer money and suddenly there'd be someone to talk to.

For the millionth time, Sebastian bounced the ball off the floor and the wall to catch it again in one fluid motion, the time feeling slow around him in a way that made him always appear as if he were some great cat, all elegant muscle rolling in and out again like the crash of waves on the beach. Maybe Sevrin would be bored by now- but the music slipping under his brother's door was still the sweeping round waltzes of the eldest Bach son, a sure sign that his summer project had not yet entered a stage that he would allow himself to walk away from. "If you were going to study all summer, I could have stayed in Spain." He sighed, rolling his eyes before continuing down the flights of stairs again. Of course, he didn't mean it. Not really. True, Spain did have certain appeals that Ireland did not, like the chance to learn to tango from a pretty girl or day trips to the odd nude beach, but it  _was_ nice to have dinner with the family every night. And there was something enjoyable about listening to Sevrin argue with himself over paragraphs and curse in Gaelic while their mother wasn't looking. Sebastian couldn't help and wish though that perhaps his family hadn't been as busy as they always had been, or that maybe they'd had room in their business for him.

It was claustrophobia that finally forced him into the ballroom. It was crumbly, and leaking in the roof, full of the leftovers of eras gone by, but it wasn't the same small room that he'd been in all week, and it had room to swing a hurling stick if he wanted, and things to sort if he didn't, and no strange paintings that he hadn't been able to convince anyone else that they wanted in their rooms either. Even now it was a beautiful space, caught somewhere between standing and crumbling as it was. It was easy to see what it used to be- large fireplaces to keep it warm for dancing even in the coldest of winters, tall windows for light, great round places in the ceiling between arches to throw the sounds of music or performers from end to end and create the imaginary expanse of sky. Holes and rain, wind and the local flora had done less to erase these things than to make them seem all the more unreal and untouchable. Modernity too screamed from its place here, caught in long scratches on the floor from the dragging of heavy furniture and the bloodstains of wounded men seeped into the hardwood and velvet upholstery. A great baroque gilded mirror lay in the dust surrounded by stray bullet casings and it's own shattered insides. If this had been closer to the town, Sebastian might have expected the layers of faded graffiti and remains of amateur seances that littered other abandoned buildings, but the room was conspicuously absent of tags and candle stubs. Seb had come in just for some space, but standing there... standing there he wanted to part of it. He shivered and retreated back into the tower for supplies, coming back ready to work.

Now outfitted with work gloves and a mask, and a Spotify playlist picked at random (What was this anyway? Something Irene had sent him, had to be. She loved this kind of thing.) he set about to trying to clean up the place. Sticking buckets under leaking places, sweeping broken glass into trash bags, removing the first of layers upon layers of dirt to see what could be salvaged from underneath. In another box nearby he tossed anything that looked interesting or important: a forgotten officer's jacket, stained, circa WWI. A lighter with some interesting engraving. Crumpled and water damaged photographs from a handful of different eras. A few antique bullets. Slowly and methodically he moved through the room until there was clear floor to stand on from one end to the other. The rain had stopped, and Sebastian was down to the fireplace at the end of the room near the body of the house picking up pieces of the shattered mirror that had once hung above it. If any corner of this room needed heating, it was certainly this one. The hard work had left him sweating only a few feet away, but here it felt like he was standing in front of the freezers at the grocery store. "The airflow over here must be ____." It would explain the fumes too- there had to be something leaking through from an old furnace- it was starting to make him paranoid. Something walked through the shards of the mirror way they lay-

No.

Nothing was walking through shards of glass. Maybe behind him? 

Sebastian blinked and looked behind him, expecting Sevrin to finally have emerged from his studying or his mother to have come back from town with armfuls of samples and research on local history and architecture, but he was met with only empty air. Frowning he turned back to the shards only to see something cross through them again. If he wasn't sure he wasn't high he could have sworn it was someone in a dark coat. Sebastian rubbed his eyes and tossed his gloves into the box of interesting things before he grabbed it and headed back for the kitchen. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I'm late again on this guys. I promise I am not abandoning it, I won't do that again, I am just very easily distracted. I'm hoping to work in a thing to the lore here, but I'm not sure how it's going to work out yet in the timeline. Maybe that could be a question you could answer for me? There isn't a poll this week but I'd love it if in the future you could let me know if you want to spend more time in the present timeline, the past timeline (which we haven't been to yet) or in the place where Jim and Seb are actually together and not having this lead-up. Just toss it in the comments or something so I know how you're feeling about it. 
> 
> For the Record: The only person who voted on the poll for the last chapter was me doing a test vote, so I think we're going to put that off for a while until we're at a more dramatic part in the story. Not that I don't want your input, but actually HAVING input is a key part in that process.
> 
> Anyways thanks for the feedback so far, and thanks for sticking with me! I really do hope that you liked this chapter and that it feels like it's going somewhere even if you're not quite sure where that is. See you soon!


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THIS IS NOT A REAL CHAPTER. I JUST NEED SOME HELP DECIDING ON WHICH VERSION OF THE CHAPTER TO GO WITH IN ORDER TO PASS MY WRITER'S BLOCK.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm leaving this poll up until I get a few answers at least. I really need help guys. It's just a comment poll.

So the versions of it go like this. Please note that these events will probably happen regardless, it's more of an order/significance debate.

  1. "Rene, what's a shrike?" In which we have a phone conversation with Irene that leads to her deciding to come to Ireland for suspicious reasons. It has also more to do with creepy things happening in the house and noticing it with Sevrin and Irene around and the different ways it seems to react to them. The thing, whatever it is, is following them and growing more active. Making the house more active. Waking other things.
  2. "You'd best leave those alone." Sebastian meets some of the locals. Well, one at least, who has some very particular advice about the mansion's gardens. Kate knows the local history that Seb doesn't, including why the family left the house to rot, why the shrines and the ancient trees were torn down. Bonus? Sevrin trying to hit on Kate, who is 100% gay and not having it.
  3. "How do you manage to be both Psyche and Endymion?" Surprise! Irene has just shown up in Ireland and she's taken to the house and being back with Sebastian right away. Seb, however, can't get over the weird things she keeps saying, or the way she keeps looking at things like they have answers to questions he hasn't asked yet. Or why she seems so unconcerned with the thing in the house. And if she doesn't tell him what she means about Psyche and Endymion at some point so help me he's going to lose it because she's said it 20 times now.
  4. "Captian Thomas Halliwell, 1916." In which we dive into the box of artifacts and find one journal (logbook?) from a certain soldier who spent time in the house previously, documenting the hauntings over time. This chapter would serve as a portrait of the house.



Yeah so pick a number and comment. Soon here (meaning in the next chapter or so) Seb and Jim are actually going to meet but I feel like it needs a little more of a lead in first, I just don't know what is happening next.

 

Sorry things are taking so long, like I said, I lost my job and I'm in a slump so nothing is getting done. You should see my laundry.


End file.
